[lbo-talk] me on Kuttner's latest

Charles Peterson charlesppeterson at yahoo.com
Sat Jan 12 09:38:31 PST 2008


I see this review as a terrible example of "circular firing squad of the left". Doug, from the far left, is shooting down Kuttner, from the center left, strangely, it appears, because of Kuttner's possibly exaggerated rhetoric of what the center left had accomplished before the Reagan Revolution. Some of this review could have been written by Bill Bennett.

Is it the welfare state that Doug opposes? It did not seem so when I read Doug's brilliant "After the New Economy." Sure, the welfare state is not revolutionary change, it's a palliative measure, but we come to treasure those things in times like these when it appears proper revolutionary change (backed by nearly all the people) may be another century or two away. Meanwhile, we gotta eat.

It's worth pointing out I think that the percentage below the poverty line reached it's lowest point in 1973, just as we were losing the one whom Chomsky rightly calls our "last liberal President" (Nixon). That was when the unraveling of the New Deal began in earnest.

And ironically, like many center left economists (e.g. DeLong) Doug seems to buy into the argument that it was the lefter elements of the 1932-1973 era which lead to it's demise. I'd argue something very different. I think it was the unchecked costs of imperialism: the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, etc. All those resources put into destructive "investments." Without that, we could have built a proper welfare state, like they have in Europe today, which, as Paul Krugman recently notes, is now doing pretty nicely (despite a somewhat different set of problems).

We were trying to buy guns and butter. The guns won.

Roosevelt also tried to build a better welfare state, which might have ended the Depression before WWII. But he was held back in every direction. Finally, when the War came, the hold was released, and government expenditures could reach the required Keynesian levels.

BTW, if you look at the GDP curve, it bottoms right at 1932, and begins an unparalleled rise, with some fluctuations, until 1973. Economic historians like to call the 1945-1973 era "The Golden Age of Capitalism".

But why discount the rise that actually began in 1932? I think that's a clear attempt to discount the positive influence of the New Deal for political reasons.

Sure, you can try to be fair and balanced like Krugman in "Peddling Prosperity" and say the rise that began in 1932 was business cycle, using the "potential growth" statistic. But why be so fair and balanced when the other side isn't? I don't believe in "fair and balanced." In the end, there is no absolute truth out there (like that evil anti-democratic collaborator Socrates posited), and we're all really rhetoriticans like the pre-Socratics. If FDR had been as bad as the Business Class thought, there wouln't have been a rise under his watch, we'd have gone straight into the toilet. In fact, it might have done so under someone else, nobody really knows or can prove otherwise.

I don't think we should be shooting down center leftists. (BTW, I consider myself a socialist.) We should be working with them to bring as much reform as possible.

Doug wrote:
>Kuttner offers an exhaustive description of the deep
sickness of the
> U.S. economy. Incomes at the middle and lower ranks
have >stagnated or

So, you agree with that, no?


> Besides a sick economy, Kuttner sees a sick
democracy.

And that too?


> Before taking on the big stuff, I have to pick a
fight with that
>claim about the lack of time. According to the Bureau
of Labor
>Statistics time use surveys, the employed people with
children under

OK, this is straight out of Bill Bennett. Blame the victim. You take the hardest working people in the world (except for maybe the Chinese), many working two and three shifts, and blame them for watching a few hours of TV a day. That's relaxation for many people.

(Not me, I only watch serious programs like Democracy Now!)


> And the great postwar boom was one in which market
dynamism
> took a back seat to what Baran and Sweezy called
Monopoly Capita

Yup. Kind of like the Europe we now look up to, after a half century of squandering 10's of trillions on war.


> Stability of that sort can never be sustained.

Seems to work if the Keynianism is for the people and not for the war machine.


>Analyses like
> Kuttner's (and even Naomi Klein's,

Yeah, take a nice jab a Klein too, while you're at it, without much substatiation. BTW, er latest book is praised by a host of serious leftists. It's on my pile.


>The elite response?tight money,
>union-busting, deregulation?was designed precisely to
increase the
>level of insecurity and fear among workers and to
restore competition
>to financial and product markets. It succeeded
massively on its own
>terms. But the restoration of market dynamism
required deepening the
>very pathologies that Kuttner laments.

You lament those changes too, no?


> "The Life of the Party," Kuttner took pains to
differentiate himself from the disreputable extremes.

OK, but is he still dissing The Nation and praising The New Republic?


> But
> would there have been a New Deal without the CIO,
the CPUSA or the
> USSR?

We don't know. As we don't know if there would have been without FDR, or if the coup (revealed by Smedly Butler) against FDR had succeeded.


> But Kuttner
> nonetheless imagines that a full-throated populist
appeal could win
> the Dems millions of votes.

Better than the alternative.


> But he
> repeatedly forgets that influence to land in some
kind of unspecified
> hope that the party will just come to its senses.

Sometimes big money doesn't win.


> And like many
> liberal analysts, he underestimates the appeal of
laissez-faire
> economic policies to many white Protestants, who
view the market as
> an admirable and tireless system of punishment and
reward, perfect
> for a fallen humanity given to shirking and
freeloading.

So, are you saying it's inevitable, the only way, like a market fundamentalist?


> It's not clear who the audience for this book is.

But fairly clear who the audience of this review is, the anti-reformists, who are often anti-democratic when it comes right down to it. Doug has been losing credibility among this bunch, so in this review, he proves his mettle again.

Democracy is where the people are. Now, not tomorrow.

Chomsky notes that there is no contradiction between reform and revolution. You have to begin with reform.

Only when reform reaches roadblocks, and everyone sees it, can you have revolution.


> If you read a book like this

Honestly I wouldn't bother with a Kuttner book. Mediocre compared to Doug's brilliant books, or those of Chomsky or Chalmers Johnson. Or even Klein.

But I see no need to trash him and his ideas. He's trying, and he may be reaching some people.


> The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling
together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully." That was Friedrich Engels writing in 1892, during the First Gilded Age. The name of Engels can make certain people squirm, and the language sounds a little antique?but how much of that description would you have to change today?

So, you're dropping Engles name to defend what, exactly? The creative destruction of Capitalism? The Only Way?

It all seems like pointless ego attack. Kuttner attacks the "extremes" so Doug strikes back. As they say about tenured college professors, the lesser the substantive disagreement, the more heated the arguments. Could have either been written either by Bill Bennett or Alexander Cockburn. I would have expected much much better of Doug Henwood.

Charles Pointer San Antonio, TX

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